News by Subject Chemistry & Physics

Engineers looking to nature for inspiration have long assumed that layered structures like those found in mollusk shells enhance a material's toughness, but a study shows that's not always the case. The findings may help engineers avoid 'naive biomimicry, the researchers say.

Professor Kimoon Kim and his research team identified a new hierarchical self-assembly mechanism

Researchers were able to track the activity of each neuron in the entire brain of zebrafish larvae and reconstruct the unfolding of neuronal events as the animals repeatedly made 'left or right' choices in a behavioral experiment. The resulting frame-by-frame view of a decision in the making was so detailed that, 10 seconds before the fish responded, the researchers could predict what their next move will be and when they would execute it.

Atrazine is one of the most widely used pesticides in North America. Researchers at the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS) have developed a new method to degrade it that combines a new nanostructured material and sunlight.

Researchers in China demonstrated a robotic gripping mechanism that mimics how a sea anemone catches its prey. The bionic torus captures and releases objects by crimping its skin. The grasper not only is relatively cheap and easy to produce but also can grab a variety of objects of different sizes, shapes, weights and materials. They discuss their work in this week's Applied Physics Letters.

A new method of infrared spectroscopy developed at BESSY II makes single-measurement observation and analysis of very fast as well as irreversible reaction mechanisms in molecules feasible for the first time. Previously, thousands of such reactions have had to be run and measured for this purpose. The research team has now used the new device to investigate how rhodopsin molecules change after activation by light -- a process that is the basis of how we see.

Researchers at University of California San Diego have discovered that when certain microbes pair up, stunning floral patterns emerge.